Leonard Slatkin led the New York Philharmonic with flautist Robert Langevin in a concert featuring Copland’s El Salón México, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, Boléro, and the New York Philharmonic premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Flute Concerto.

A silver sequined gown and sparkling virtuosity dazzled a good proportion of the audience in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in a recital by Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili. However, can virtuosity for its own sake be too much of a good thing?

I have commented before about Marc-André Hamelin’s ability to tackle anything the piano repertoire can throw at him: the craggy, disparate edifice of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, Stockhausen’s Klavierstück IX, Villa-Lobos’ savage Rudepoema, the mannered classicism of Haydn, and the sweeping romanticism of Liszt.

The virtuoso pianist Marc-André Hamelin played a program of works by Bach, Fauré, Ravel and Rachmaninov, bracketed by his own Variations on a theme by Paganini. Last March in Toronto, when Hamelin snuck this piece into the program as an encore, I wrote that it was “ten minutes of the most fun you’ll ever have crowding around a piano at the end of party.

An introductory reading by local writer Philip Pullman was an appropriate introduction to the “Dusk to Dawn” concert, one of the last in this year’s Oxford Chamber Music Festival (themed “Fairytales and Fantasy”).

The word 'prodigy' is unavoidable when writing about Benjamin Grosvenor, or so it appears for the headline writers. Having eschewed many big concert dates and growing as an artist in smaller halls, he is clearly setting himself up for the long haul. This ambitious, sold-out Cambridge concert showed both how brilliant a pianist he already is, and hinted at how far he could go in the future.